CHAPTER XVII.
"All the secret of the spring
Moved in the chambers of the blood."
"Lovely spring
A brief sweet thing,
Is swift on the wing."
QUEEN ELEANOR—"...Some
Flowers, they say, if one pluck deep enough.
Bleed as you gather."
BOUCHARD—"That means love, I think.
You gather it, and there's the blood at root."
Winter was softening to spring. It was the dismal transition period, when half-frozen mud and icy slush take the place of snow. The deep drifts of the winter were gone; only in the fence-corners there yet remained darkened icy ridges, showing their outline.
The fields were bare, but the discolored snow still lay in patches on the roads, where it had been beaten hard. The world never looks so desolate and disreputable as at this time, when the earth, looking up inquiringly to a comfortless sun, pleads—or so it would seem—for heat, that its nakedness may be clothed with verdure.
The tree-tops in the woodlands clashed together, and the blows seemed to start the sap within them, for their buds began to swell, and all along their branches the satiny receptacles, wherein were coiled the first leaves, glistened.
The sugar maples sparkled night and morning with tiny icicles, where the sweet sap that oozed out at noon froze in the colder breath of evening. Every schoolboy in Jamestown had swollen lips from eating these icicles—dainty morsels they were, too, their flavor the very essence of sweetness.
All the trees in the forest seemed to stand at "attention," awaiting the command of the sun to leap to life. Only the low-growing witch-hazel, that uncanny tree, associated with the Black Art from time immemorial, had taken upon itself to bedeck its limbs with fuzzy little yellow and brown tufts of bloom.
But none of the other trees followed its example. They waited the heat of the sun. From all accounts, the root of the witch-hazel seeks less celestial fires to draw its life from. At any rate, this overwise tree knows all subterranean secrets, all the wonders of the water, all the wind's weird whisperings. Passed along the surface of the earth, does it not divine where, far beneath, the hidden springs gush forth? Launched upon the water, does it not stop and tremble where the drowned one lies? Before the coming of the storm, do its leaves not dance, and nod, and rustle, though moved by no perceptible influence save the intoxication of their own evil sap? Besides, what magical mysteries, what eerie orgies, does it not share with hairs from black cats' tails, and moss from gravestones, and teeth of dead people? Ugh! It is no wonder that its deep, deep roots know where to seek for warmth.
The moss upon the rocks that faced the lake front was vividly green. Last year's dead leaves had rotted beneath the snows, and the empty seed-vessels of the tall weeds served as bells for the jesting wind.
Whatever suggestions of bygone beauty, whatever anticipations of unborn flowers lurked in the woods, the village at this time looked depressingly squalid. Relying upon the snow's charity in covering a multitude of sins, the untidy housekeepers had imposed upon it. Now they were shamed. The melting snow left exposed all the debris of the winter. Heaps of tea-leaves cast forth by careless hands beside the doors, ashes flung out hastily, bones, broken crockery, and the heads of decapitated chickens bestrewed the streets.
Outwardly, at least, Jamestown had been quite a decent village before the snow melted; now, it showed like a hypocrite from whom the robe has been torn away.
With the first break in the winter weather, the men began to "go over" the fences, rebuilding those the snow had broken, replacing the rails and boards that the wind had torn off, and sinking new posts where the frosts had heaved the old ones out of the earth.
Clem Humphries had long been impatient to leave Myron's and get out of the reach of Ann's irritating tongue, and his eager search for work got the reward of being hired by Mr. White to bore post-holes.
He stuck to his task until he earned a few dollars; then his long-saved thirst drove him to town. The money went for the old purpose, and Clem got gloriously drunk. A sudden brief but biting spring frost setting in, he was found next morning in Mr. White's barnyard, lying by the strawstack, his fingers clasping rigidly an empty bottle, his long boots frozen to his feet.
They carried him in beside the kitchen stove, cut off his boots, and by noon old Clem was as sprightly as ever; only he cursed sulphurously when he saw the wreck they had made of his foot-gear. This was particularly annoying to him, because he knew that had he "only had sense enough, he could have got a good quart more of rye for them very boots they cut up, as if they weren't worth a cent."
Many men might have suffered from this experience, but alcohol has great preservative qualities and old Clem's system was saturated with it.
Clem being now "off the township" and exposed to all the inclemencies of Fortune's variable winds, it behooved him to supply himself with a new suit of religion, as the snake takes to himself a new skin. This he did. He spoke piously of his failings, his experiences, his backslidings and beliefs, so that Mrs. White held him in godly commiseration, as one sore beset by the enemy.
So Clem fed and fattened, whined diligently, and worked as little as he could help, and laughed in his sleeve at them all.
Mrs. Deans said to Homer Wilson, with sneering emphasis:
"If you should see that Myron Holder, Homer, I wish you'd tell her I want to speak to her."
"Very well," said Homer, unmoved.
"Will you be likely to see her?" pursued Mrs. Deans.
"Yes," said Homer, in a matter-of-course tone. "Oh, yes, of course I'll see her."
"Still, after all," Mrs. Deans hesitated with a fine show of prayerful reflection, "maybe I hadn't ought to ask you to call there? There's no use making things worse than they are, and I'd never forgive myself if I thought I put you in the way of wrongdoing."
"I don't understand," said Homer, calmly. "Is there anything wrong about your message?"
"Not about my message," answered Mrs. Deans; "but, after all that's come and gone, I dare say you would not like to go to the Holder place. Well, I don't know as I blame you. It's terrible discouragin' to be mixed up with such a story; but there, never mind, I can send Maley. No one would think anything of his going."
"Make your mind easy, Mrs. Deans," said Homer, contemptuously. "Ann Lemon, I am sure, has let you know that I am in the habit of going to Myron's as often as she'll let me. I'll be very glad of your message as an excuse to go again."
With this Homer departed, leaving Mrs. Deans as nearly dumbstruck as it was possible for her to be.
That afternoon Myron stood knocking at Mrs. Deans' kitchen-door, holding My by the hand, whilst he struggled to get away to the collie dog which lay on the porch, its front paws crossed in an attitude of dignified leisure.
From the poultry-yard came the mingled babble of the fowls' cries. A thin blue banner of smoke uncoiled in a long spiral from behind the house. It diffused an aroma of herbs and withered grass: the rakings of the garden were being burned. Gamaliel and the hired men were opening a ditch in the field next the house. Their coarse voices and coarser laughing came clearly through the spring air. A sparrow flew down and, laden with a long straw, flew up again to the woodshed eaves, where its mate proceeded to help it to weave the straw into the walls of their nest. The old cat, thinner now than in the winter, looked up at their toiling malignantly. Every now and then the eye was conscious of a dark speck above the line of direct vision, as the swallows soared in long sweeps over the building.
The sky was bright, but not very warm; and when one of the many floating clouds interposed a veil betwixt its rays and the earth, there came a quick sense of chill. The men's voices grew higher and more confused. Then, clear above the murmur that they made, came shrill whistles and shouts of "Bob! Bob!" The collie sprang up, and, throwing dignity to the wind, wriggled between the boards of the garden fence and darted across the field, to enjoy presently a hilarious chase after a pair of water-rats that the men had found in the stopped up drain.
It was a spring day—all delicate sunshine and shimmering shadow, all soft with tints of mother-o'-pearl, with hints of after-heats and breaths of bygone bitterness. Above floated "the wind-stirred robe of roseate gray," and beneath the earth lay murmurous, sentient, expectant, and eager, with little streams finding their way to the lake, each seeming the bearer of sweeter secrets than we know.
"O water, thou that wanderest, whispering,
Thou keep'st thy counsel to the last!
What spell upon thy bosom should Love cast,
His message thence to wring?"
A spring day—yet somewhat sad, and strange with the uncertainty of unfulfilled dreams. It was but one minor note in Nature's glad interlude between "winter's rains and ruins" and summer's languorous perfections, fleeting to the eye, elusive to the memory, but lingering long in the heart.
Myron knocked and waited. Presently Liz opened the door. She had a knife in one hand, a potato in the other, and her fingers were stained a deep brown. Liz was cutting seed-potatoes, and even as she walked back to her place by the window, dexterously sliced the potato she held into angled bits, preserving in each an eye for growth to spring from. Mrs. Deans came, and when Myron left she had arranged for another summer's toil under her benign influence.
Mrs. Deans had decided to raise poultry more extensively than ever this year, and, berate Myron as she might, she recognized fully how valuable her faithful services were. Mrs. Deans proposed that My should be left with Ann Lemon during the day, but Myron said humbly but very decidedly that the child must come with her. Mrs. Deans demurred, but read Myron's pale determination aright, and finally consented. It gave her an excuse, however, for still further reducing the meagre pay she had given Myron the summer before.
Myron had been prepared for this, and did not grumble when Mrs. Deans named the lower wage, whereat Mrs. Deans was wroth with herself that she had not said still less.
Ann Lemon went back to her own house, and Myron once more went back and forth to the village. The winter had changed her. She no longer shrank from before the gaze of those cold eyes that met hers daily. Instead, she met their glances with firm lips and unmoved eye, not boldly, not appealingly, but with an acceptance of rebuke and scorn that was stronger in its endurance than wrath, with a patience more pathetic than any appeal.
No smile ever moved her lips, no anger ever raised her voice. If tears ever dimmed her eyes, they were unseen. If any ray of hope yet flickered within her breast, it was well hidden; its fires never flushed her cheeks nor troubled her eyes, and those humble eyes were "deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even."
The spring advanced. Each evening whispered of a new beauty, each night saw the birth of a new mystery, each morning revealed it in nature's mirror, each day bespoke some completion of beauty, some fulfillment of hope.
Spring—"all bloom and desire"—is not the time for love to end. It is rather the growing time of every tender joy, and Homer Wilson found himself hoping against hope. He contrived to meet Myron very often now, in the early mornings or late twilight, as she traversed the road between the village and Mrs. Deans'. He had done what he could to dissuade her from going to Mrs. Deans', but a refusal to do so meant a full acceptance of his aid. Myron held back her hand from such overwhelming alms. Homer had done, therefore, what he could for her—ploughed the little lot about her house and planted it with potatoes and vegetables for her, and mended the fence and piled great heaps of split wood in the woodshed.
He pleaded with her sometimes, but to no avail—at least none that was perceptible to him. The water beating against a rock does not realize its own victories; but we see the honeycombed cells that attest its persistence, and predict that some day the water will have won a way for itself over the fragments of the rocky barrier. But the springs run dry sometimes, and the rock remains unconquered, but barren and parched, thirsting for the water that loved it once. To each successive plea Myron felt it harder and harder to say "No."
When Homer asked for her love, his face shone with that seraphic light that never yet "has shone on land or sea," and she felt it very bitter to banish it. Sometimes he touched her to tears. Sometimes, dry-eyed, she begged him so piteously to desist that he felt himself a cur to have urged her.
Indeed, in those calm spring weeks his heart was the abode of perpetual conflict, the place of passion and pain, the home of love and longing—
"O fretted heart, tossed to and fro,
Rest was nearer than thou wist."
Through all these turbulent times Homer bore himself well. He had again the old genial manner, the old patience, the old generosity. His people presumed upon his unfaltering good-temper, and made their demands more and more exacting. He gave all they sought of his time, trouble, and money, and to their reproaches replied not again.
Upon every subject under the sun he heard them patiently, save the one subject next his heart. That he held sacred.
His mother had said to him one day:
"You'll never marry her, Homer?"
"God knows I'm afraid I won't," he said.
"Do you mean to say——" began his mother.
"There is nothing but this to say," he answered, very quietly, but in a voice that silenced her; "I would give my right hand—my life—everything—if I could persuade Myron Holder to marry me."
So he left her; but his mother's incredulous exclamation, "You'll never marry her!" cankered in his heart like a bitter prophecy.
Afterwards, when Mrs. Wilson thought over all the days and doings of her son, she thought of this also, and told the conversation to her neighbors, and they all then looked upon Myron Holder as one who, having gotten a man's soul, would not let him assoil himself by marrying her.
But this was after.
The old rag peddler going his rounds stopped once more at Mrs. Deans' door. Little My trotted out from the kitchen, and the old peddler eyed him with the longing gaze of a childless man. Mrs. Deans bargained for her pie-plates, and My stood gazing reflectively at the big black horse.
"Say, Mrs. Deans," said the ragman, "whose young one is that?"
"Oh," answered Mrs. Deans, feelingly, "that's Myron Holder's brat!"
"You don't say! Well, 'taint much like the Holders. I knowed Jed," he added, after a pause.
That night the ragman drove home, his van heavily laden, and his wife helped him to bestow the canvas sacks in the barn, and later looked over his stock of tins and ran over the book. She was a queer little figure. Her dress was of dark woollen stuff that they gave her husband at the shoddy-mills. It was curiously and lavishly adorned with buttons: there were rows of buttons on the sleeves from wrist to elbow, a veritable breast-plate of them on the bodice; they jingled on her shoulders and glistened on her skirts.
In a deep-down corner of her miserly little soul there lurked a taste for finery. Denied legitimate expression by her miserliness, it found vent in this barbaric adorning of her gowns. The pearl and crockery buttons she did not use—those she sewed on cards to resell; but all the fancy metal ones she found on the rags, being unsalable, she appropriated toward the decoration of her penurious person, and let her fancy run riot in the arrangement of them.
"Where's the little red tin mug?" she asked her husband, as she pored over his ragged daybook. "I don't see it in the van, and I don't see it marked in the sales."
Her husband shifted uneasily.
"I give it to Myron Holder's young one. He was playing about the wagon at Deans'."
"You did!" said his wife. "You did! What for?"
"I knowed Jed," began her husband, apologetically; but he was cut short by a contemptuous snub from his wife.
This was the chronicling of a little incident that gladdened Myron's heart inexpressibly.
In Myron's mind there was slowly forming an idea at this time—an idea of change. It was but dimly shadowed forth yet; but when the time came for it to take definite shape, it did so at once, and was so well established that it seemed the settled and legitimate conclusion of long reasoning. In the mean time the thought only came to her hazily—sometimes in the pauses of her work when she heard Mrs. Deans speaking of the town; sometimes when, in the early morning, she saw far away across the lake the smoke of a steamer; sometimes when, at noontide, the whistle of far-off trains smote through the air, or when, returning to the village at night, she noted the telegraph-poles, with their single wire. They seemed to incline from the village—away from its self-righteous roof-trees and censorious chimneys; away and above its babbling doorsteps and carping streets—and to point out into a wider, freer, unknown world.
Often she turned to look along the way they pointed. They took her eyes eastward, and at night the eastern prospect is dull and gray. From this forbidding outlook she would turn her eyes, with a shudder, and they would fall upon the trees of Deans' woodland, illumined by the sun which set behind them.
But if the eastern gray made her despond, the western glow behind those trees made her despair. She withdrew her gaze and hastened to the blank twilight of the village.
It was summer, and Homer Wilson, walking through his fields, was thinking of Myron Holder. He had gone early to town that morning, and as he passed the cottage she issued, with little My, from the door.
The dew lay heavy on the grass; the silence was stirred by the singing of birds; the haze that lay over the land presaged a day of intense heat. The fires were being lighted in the village, and the first smoke was lingering lazily above the roofs. The hopvines about the cottage glistened at every point with drops of dew, and, as the sparrows twittered through the tendrils, they sent sparkling little showers down. The morning-glories that Myron had planted beneath the window were covered with their cup-like blooms. There is no flower on earth more beautiful in delicate fragility of texture, in purity of tint, in shape and translucent color than a morning-glory with the dew upon it.
It was a morning to live and love in. And it seemed to Homer Wilson that the whole gracious aspect of the day was completed by the forms of Myron and her boy as they stood without the gate.
His heart yearned for her as he helped her into the wagon by his side. At Mrs. Deans' he lifted her down, holding her for an instant in his arms. The keen "possessive pang" that thrilled him shook his spirit with its sacred sweetness.
And to-night he was going to her with yet another prayer upon his lips.
The sultry day had fulfilled the prophecy of the misty morning. The air was heavy with odors. Every weed and grass, each flower and vine, each bush and tree, had given its quota of perfume to form the frankincense that nature offers to the midsummer moon. The exhalations from a million tiny cells mingled together in that odorous oblation.
And as he crossed the fields Homer saw the moon, round and red, rising slowly over the lake. Slowly—slowly—it rose, paling as it attained the higher heavens, until it soared—
"In voluptuous whiteness, Juno-like,
A passionate splendor"—
most worthy to be worshipped.
As Homer knocked at Myron's door the moon veiled itself behind some close-wreathed clouds, so that from the dimness of the cloudy sky Homer passed within the doorway.
* * * * * *
The moon was still obscured when he emerged, so that his face was hid. But before him there stretched, at last seen with clear eyes, the definite dreariness of a solitary life. Behind him he knew a woman lay prone upon a bare floor, sobbing and wrestling with the evil of her own nature, with hard-wrought hands half-outstretched to him—half-withdrawn, to cover her shamed eyes. Within his breast he bore the memory, not of rejection or of rebuke, but the echo of a plea for mercy—the broken syllables of a woman's voice raised in an appeal for help against her own weakness.
Nor had it been made in vain. For Homer Wilson, in the moment of that supreme temptation, had risen superior to himself—had put aside his own strength to help her weakness—had overcome his passion with his love. He had uttered a passionate word or two of comprehension, offered an incoherent pledge of aid—comfort—approval—and then, stumbling out of the door, hastened away, disregarding, for her sake, the cry of "Homer—Homer!" that seemed to follow him.
* * * * * *
Each of us has a wilderness and a temptation therein, although oft we pass through it, unrecking of the devils that attend us until they have stolen all they sought. Sometimes our wilderness is a perfumed garden, through which insidious devils dog our laggard footsteps. Sometimes it is a shaded pleasaunce, through which we tread with stately steps, unwitting of the derisive demons that smile as they mock our pageantry of pride. With retrospective agony, we turn to gaze upon the mirages of these scenes, as one views sunlit seas where wrecks have been, and cry aloud, "Here much precious treasure was lost!" But there are other wildernesses wherein we wander, consciously beset with Evil Spirits whose faces we know.
It was thus with Myron Holder. Her wilderness was indeed "a land of sand and thorns," thorns whose acrid sap was sucked from salt pools of tears. And the Spectre Demon that beset her there was the Devil of her own passion. By day it lingered round her steps, tempting her with suggestions of the Lethean draught its pleasures would bring, whispering to her how excusable she would be if she yielded to its allurements; for it did not fail to point out that she had no debt of kindness to repay with worthiness.
All day she fought against this Tempting One, who speedily enleagued all the other evils of her nature to aid him.
The battle raged fiercely, the bright light in her eyes, the flaming cheeks and trembling hands attesting the strife. One night, when the heat of summer made even the night winds sultry, when all nature was in the full height of its development, when the fields were deep in grass and the clover heavy with bloom—on such a night the door of a hop-clad cottage in Jamestown opened softly and closed as gently, and through the sleeping streets and out into the country a wild figure sped. She, for it was a woman, with flushed cheeks and loose-coiled hair, advanced a short distance along the highway, and then, swiftly climbing the fence, made her way diagonally across the fields of dew-drenched grass—across one field, another, and another—holding her slanting course as steadily and unswervingly as though she followed a beaten track.
As she ran, the spirit of the night and the intoxicating odor of flowers and grasses entered into her and steeped her senses in a delirium of freedom. She sprang on—now running, now half-dancing, once going a rod or two in the old childish "hippety-hop" fashion.
She reached the boundary of Deans' woodland, and plunged into its shadows with as little hesitation as she had entered the field of clover. She threaded the wood swiftly, her eyes fixed straight before her, never seeming to see the obstacles which opposed her path, although she avoided them unerringly.
Bats whose eyes have been pierced out exercise this same blind avoidance of obstacles, and it was only this woman's heart that had been wounded.
She held on her way.
At length she saw a far-off gleam of water, and knew she had all but reached her destination.
On she went, and, pushing through the dense mass of witch-hazel bushes that grew along the top of the lake bank, jumped. It seemed a leap to destruction, for Deans' woods bounded the lake here with high, precipitous cliffs; but the path to that spot was marked by her heart-blood, and she had made no error in following it. She had a drop of four feet or so; and then she stood upon a long, narrow, jutting ledge, surrounded by the tops of the trees that grew below it on the bank proper. From the top of the bank it was almost invisible—entirely so, unless the looker penetrated the witch-hazel hedge. From the lake it was plainly seen.
Here, then, she paused, looking forth over the water, and being scorned by the moon—
"For so it is, with past delights
She taunts men's brains and makes them mad."
* * * * * *
She stood upon the rocky point and held out her clasped hands despairingly. Her hair, loosened by many a tugging branch, fell about her in wild disorder—now blown across her flushed cheeks, wild eyes and parted lips; now wrenched back by the high wind, its whole weight streaming behind her; now framing her face in dusky convolutions.
In the mute agony of her gesture, she seemed a fit emblem of despairing grief—the grief of Psyche for Adonis.
The moon broke from the embrace of its clouds and sailed high up into the night, then faded towards the horizon.
And still she stood, outwearing her passion by her patience. About her surged all the weird melodies that loneliness and night and despair smite from the heart-strings. The blood sang in her ears, a monotonous obligato to those piercing notes.
* * * * * *
She looked out into the night. Her eyes demanded from it some balm to soothe their burning; her heart some solace for its pain. Her soul cried out against the silence without, which seemed such a maddening environment to the fightings within. Her whole being demanded an answering emotion from some one or something.
"Shake out, carols!
Solitary here—the night's carols!
Carols of lonesome love! Death's carols!
Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon—
Oh, under that moon where she drops almost down into the sea!
Oh, reckless, despairing carols!"
But the moon was mute, the night silent, and she was alone. She could not analyze her own emotions, nor vivisect her own soul; could not separate shreds of Desire, fibres of loneliness, tissues of misery, until she had disintegrated the whole mass of Despair that was crushing her.
She could but suffer.
* * * * * *
She lay prone upon the ledge of rock, her hands clutching the short, glossy mountain grass; resisting the wooing of the airy space below that called her to oblivion, purchased by one leap outward—a leap—no, one single step—out into the kindly air.
How small a price at which to buy immunity from those thorny roads she trod with bleeding feet, alone! Alone? Ah! Little My! ... The leaves were stirring with the morning's breath; the birds had not begun to sing yet, but were moving restlessly upon the branches and uttering their first waking calls—those ineffably sad heraldings of earliest dawn or latest night!
"Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns,
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds!"
The world lay silent under a reflectionless moonstone dome of gray when Myron Holder, with dew-drenched skirts and hair, relaxed limbs and pallid cheeks, entered the house where her child yet slept. Of the night's turmoil there was no trace save the signs of physical exhaustion. Her face was calm, her lips firm; her eyes shone undimmed with tears, unblurred by passion.